'Augmented Reality' What's your thoughts?
 

So I stumbled across this article in the recent edition of the Atomic magazine.

What is A.R?
Well from what I've read it's adding visuals via a set of glasses to your environment around you. These visuals line up with what you're seeing.

Say if you're in a big city looking for a pie shop, pizza shop or hot dog stand. Just plug into the pad what you're looking for and a big arrow may light up pointing in the direction of the nearest one. I think this would even be useful for mothers looking for their kids.. have some sort of tracking device on the kids. If they get seperated from the parent just activate your A.R gear to point in the direction of where they are and off you go.

Companys could put up 'A.R' Boards that the employees could look at. Or perhaps just send a message to each employees inbox where it'd come up via A.R for the to read at a chosen date.

Personally I wouldn't mind a pair.. maybe when they become abit more fashionable and 'stylish' so to speak. I don't think i'd like to walk around with a large pair of black rimmed glasses on. But you can count me in when they get to that stage for the consumer :cool:

As a Quote from AtomicPC Magazine
Edit: A link from the article to a Professor Steve Manns website who has been studying AR for years...
WearCam

Hmmmmm cyberpunk.... but the corporations are always so evil.

Ill agree with that second point.

*goes back to grumbling about the obscene racket that is the textbook market*

I've had that idea floating around my brain for years now. Seems to be a very cool idea, if I might say so myself. :)

The whole direction finder thing is nothing more than an evolution of the current car-based navigation equipment, combined with smaller, wearable computers.

Of course, the problem with this sort of thing is how to get it right - too much "augmented" information will obscure reality, which can lead to some seriously bad accidents...

my uni has been playing around with the ideas of augmenteted reality for a while now,
they came up with this http://machen.mrl.nott.ac.uk/Challen...gurscopeII.htm
it allows u to walk around nottingham castle and see how it originally looked like (its ruins now).
haven't used it, but apparantly works well, idea is cool too

The technology behind AR is really hard. Devices have to track your head movements by the fractions of degree because any movement of your head means a much larger change in the images being displayed since the display is so close to your eye compared to where you are looking. Also tracking the exact position of the person wearing the device accurately enough is very hard. The technology just isn't there for this kind of thing to be mainstream yet.